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With Katie Langin
When Teddy Goetz – a fourth-year medical student at Columbia University – applied for residency programs in October 2020, he felt like he had no choice but to be outdoors as transgender. “I had to put my surname all over my application because of my publications, and that was very upsetting,” he says. He changed his legal name to Teddy last year. But many of his papers listed him using a name he no longer recognizes.
Prior to submitting his claims, Goetz had contacted all of his published magazines in full – 14 to request that they change their name. Two journals offered to change their name and provide notice of correction. Many others did not have a policy for dealing with author name changes and refused to change name without one. He was sorry, but he continued to press the magazines to accept his request. Now, all but one publication has a changed name or is in the process of being changed. “It’s a very long process and it takes a lot of… labor, time, energy, attention, big spreadsheets,” he says. But it’s worth it. “My legacy should not be a name that does not belong to me; the legacy should be mine. “
Goetz is part of an informal group of transgender scientists who have been pushing for changes in the scientific publishing industry to make it more inclusive – not just for transgender scientists -put, but also for others who change their names as a middle guardian, for example due to a change in marital status or religion. Over the past 6 months, they have seen significant progress: Many scientific publishers – including the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Royal Society of Chemistry, PLOS, Wiley, and AAAS – have established policies that making it easier for authors to change their first or last name on published papers. (AAAS is the publisher at Science Jobs.) Springer Nature, which publishes more than 2500 journals, plans to announce a new name change policy “soon,” according to an emailed statement to Science Careers
The new policies allow authors to change their names without public notice of any kind. That marks a breach of previous practices, which did not normally allow for a change of name or required corrective notice and coauthor consent if a change was made. “In the past, there was a common view that ‘what has been published has been published,'” said Lisa Pecher, editor at Cemie Angewandte who worked on Wiley’s name change policy. But it’s important to accept authors who change their names, add Pecher, who are transgender. The policy move “places the power over who can share this sensitive information in the hands of the author, where it belongs.”
Many magazines view their policies as work in progress and continue discussions on how they can implement the changes. For example, it is unclear how publishers work together to update reference lists of previously published papers. “It can’t be something that one publisher handles all on their own,” says Jessica Rucker, ACS global editorial operations director, who is actively working on how to approach values.
However, it is clear that “the consensus is shifting – the publishing world has noticed that this is an area on which they have fallen,” says Theresa Tanenbaum, an assistant professor at the University. California, Irvine, which is transgender and worked with the Society for Computer Device to update the name change policy in 2019. Tanenbaum says name changes are particularly important for trans scientists, who may be subject to discrimination, violence and persecution. It is not a trivial matter, she says; it is a matter of “maintaining the livelihood and safety and privacy of vulnerable people.”
The changes will also benefit other organizations, such as people who go through name changes due to marriage and divorce. “I didn’t change my name when I got married, not because I thought I was ever going to divorce my husband,” said Susan Morrissey, ACS communications director. “I had already published, so I wanted to keep that record.” With the new name change policies, Morrissey is questioning whether others in similar situations may feel cheaper to make a decision that is right for them and their family – rather than one around her. their publishing record. “My children’s lives would be a lot easier if I had it [changed my last name], ”She says.
Even with inclusive name change policies, the process of requesting changes to all prior publications remains daunting for far-off scientists. Tanenbaum, for example, has published 83 papers that were called together thousands of times before she changed and changed her name in 2019 – and it has been very promising to correct the record. . Some scientists would like publishers to move toward change at an even greater level: using a number, such as an ORCID identifier, as the primary digital identifier for an author rather than a name. That way, authors could change the name in one central location – the ORCID website, for example – and their name would recur in every place it appears in lists authors.
The publishing industry really needs to ask, “What would a full review look like?” Said Irving Rettig, a Ph.D. student at Portland State University who – through his tweet– initial discussions at ACS to review the name change policy. He is pleased with ACS ‘s new policy and was the first scientist to use it, but Rettig still considers it a “Band-Aid” approach. “The problem is that your academic record is linked to a name, and the assumption that a name is an unaltered item is wrong.”
“If it were common in our society for men to change their names at marriage, this would have been resolved decades ago,” said Tanenbaum, who is part of a working group on the subject set up by the Committee on Ethics. Publication. “I think it reflects a system of disclosure that has historically been used in patriarchal values that are at the heart of human experiences and not women. … We have long done something about it. ”